Yesterday I managed to get all my subscriptions into a single place to check how much I was spending on services. Boy, I was in for a shock. My subscription for media services has grown two-fold. Lockdown is, of course, a cause. So, I will let it float around till normalcy returns outside.
I always had my media and productivity services balanced, of course, it was never intentional. But I guess the addition of a HEY subscription might bring things again in balance. I still have 5 days to decide.
Speaking of tracking subscriptions, I used an app called Bobby while I was on iOS and I sorely missed it since I shifted to Android. However, I've found a brilliant app called (of course) Subscriptions. The app has one job and it does perfectly.
The second issue of Slanting Nib & A Keyboard is out and should be in your inboxes if you'd subscribed. I hope it caught your interest and hopefully brought a smile to your face and some thoughts in your mind.
If you haven't subscribed, you can read it online. And if you do like it, please subscribe. I have also published a page that spells out why I started the newsletter and what you can expect from each issue.
I am pretty excited with this side project -- if nothing else, it has made me discover some gem of essays from minds way smarter than mine. I hope the zeal stays on.
Words, being pre-eminent, have the potential to engross you for hours; beyond that, they have the power to mould your personality. Yet, they are ethereal when they come from the accomplished masters of the art form.
Khaled Hosseini said during one of his interviews, “there’s always something to be learned by reading another writer”. That is exactly what this second issue is about, some words of wisdom from authors well-renowned.
Why I Write, the essay of George Orwell. First published: summer 1946. A fascinating look at Orwell’s early life and what made him the writer that he eventually became.
It is his [a writer’s] job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose.
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane
Dustin Illingworth Eavesdrops on Flannery O'Connor, Susan Sontag, and More. “Few literary artifacts remain as consistently enigmatic as the author’s journal. It seems to me that the more we read of them, the more elusive their provenance”
Over the past few months, I have lived within the journals of heroes and strangers, compared daily word counts with Virginia Woolf, trembled before Alma Mahler’s social calendar, pitied Kafka’s lovers. I’ve read pages and pages with interest and empathy, with boredom and more than a little shame. But having traversed that stack of lives, what remains more than anything, tingling like a phantom limb, is a sensation of stillness: the journal as the eye of the writing life’s storm.
“In the journal,” Susan Sontag wrote, “I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”
Jhumpa Lahiri recounts her relationship with her sentences. A fine way to look at how a story or a novel, what she refers to as forest, is conceived - “one in front of the other”.
Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social.
Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively.
Cheri is an author with a brilliant mind. She has published some fine cosy mysteries that would be very valuable in these moments of isolation and social distancing. Besides, she is an astute reader of events going on around and shares her thoughts openly and regularly. Here’s an excerpt from a recent entry on her blog about her forced time in quarantine.
In a way, this moment feels like the morning after a storm. You go outside and check for damage, counting broken windows and dangling power lines, wondering how much it’s going to cost to put everything back together again. Only the thing that’s broken isn’t a house or a neighborhood, it’s the entire economy. And without a vaccine ready there are likely to be more storms rolling in. Still, even knowing that, I’m relieved to discover tiny moments of reprieve. Like a brief chat with a barista while they pull a shot of espresso, or twenty minutes sitting in the grass in a park.
Do purchase and read her books. And do follow her words.
Featured Tool - Freedom
You need a good word processor to begin writing; one powerful editor was featured in the last issue. But once you are staring at the blinking cursor inside that editor, it is staying focused, distraction-free that is absolutely necessary. Freedom helps you with exactly that. It blocks all the distractions for you to lend you a productive session of doing what you want to do. It can block apps, websites and even complete Internet access on your machine. It can sync sessions across all your devices, so you don’t go running to your smartphone when your laptop is locked down.
Freedom has saved me many hours from getting wasted. I am sure it can for every writer out there. Take it for a spin for the free trial run of 7 days.
One Final Inspiration…
Shout out to everyone writing thru the weekend:
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice"//Octavia Butler
The second issue of my weekly newsletter Slanting Nib & A Keyboard is ready and scheduled to be delivered in a few hours. I am completely humbled by the feedback and the response that the first issue received. I hope the second issue manages to keep the interest intact for the subscribers.
I am pretty excited with how this latest one has turned out too. Do check out the first issue and subscibe if you missed to do so earlier.
I paused at that last word in the title. I was so close to writing "hooked". But then I thought have they really sold the promise yet? No doubt, they are close. But, it's not a done deal yet.
Why is this service so enticing though? I mean it's just an email service. I don't even use the email that much. So why do I keep going back to HEY? It has got something to do with their promise. Of making me care even less for the email.
Every now and then I visit the "Screened Out" section to see all the mails I would have seen had I been using any other email app. And it is a mess in there. These emails never get filtered out with my existed setup. I am tired of setting all the filters in Gmail. It just doesn't work efficiently. Junk emails always end up reaching my inbox.
This hasn't been the case with HEY. Because they have decided on a sane default - everything screened out if not allowed earlier.
We ask every software to side with "opt-in" for every marginal aspect -- something that would split their users on whether they accept it or not. Why can't expect the same from our email service too?
And I haven't even gotten used to all the other features that I think are potential game-changers that many othershave well documented.
I have merged and renamed the threads -- I like the cleaner workflow.
I have set aside the emails and marked them to be handled later. I like the idea.
I do not like the feed; in its current form, it is almost useless. Is it just there so that I can skim through and ignore?
I like the paper trail section. I don't want to see those emails, but want them handy.
I love sticky notes and notes that we can put on emails. Such a simple, but brilliant idea.
However, with all said, I am conflicted. Do I want the clean experience so bad that I am willing to pay the cost? Do the junk email that I have got into the habit of deleting without a second thought bother me so much that I am willing to pay the cost? Can't I just manually screen-out the emails?
I have about a week to decide.
My definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness. Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it’s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don’t mean just to reality, but to what’s exponentially possible in reality. (...) Why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring.
Finally, I have completed a pretty tricky exercise that I had started about a couple of weeks back. It wasn't tricky because I wanted to move my website to a different platform. It was tricky because I wanted to do it cleanly. I wanted to retain as many things that worked well for me as I could. I didn't want to break much that was core.
So, after days of experiments and trial runs, and notes and list of reviewed to-dos, I've managed to switch to WordPress. I will note down why someday - one short, but big reason though is editing. I am tired of working custom solutions with Blot -- it's a great service, no doubt. But you need to love your files a lot. I am currently not in that phase.
Anyway, as intended, the core is retained. The links are (hopefully 🤞) not broken. #IndieWeb support was a must, have stitched that in. The option to switch to a dark theme was a must. A simple reading experience was a must. I've managed to get good writing experience too. So, times now to sit back and relax.
Do let me know if see anything that's not working well. I won't mind if you also let me know if everything's working fine.
I am planning to roll out some changes to my blog. I fear there would be many things that would be broken. Most importantly, soon, the RSS feed may not work. So if you are following me via my RSS feed, you might miss my posts. If you do, please resubscribe in a few days.
I find it extremely interesting that I have most things going for it now. I do not know what's even missing. Why can't I just make this my new home? Sure if can't be bad, right?
Let's look at the pros and cons. Rather this is a thought dump of sorts. No pros and cons, just some quick thoughts to compare experiences.
My existing setup is a terrible writing experience. Every time I had to think where to post from. It is so terrible for instant posts. Not with the new setup.
With WordPress, I can post from which ever place that works now. I don't have to think to much about writing. Only focus on thought. Good for fixing too. Get things out and forget.
Theming is so easy with WordPress. No more struggling with files.
That reminds me. I am tired of working with files. Blot is good with files. But it wants to play with files. Not provide metadata as such. I provide metadata everytime. It defeats the purpose of the simplicity of Blot. Why mess around the frontmatter? I am tired of working that way. I want editor. Write and forget.
With WordPress though, I lose control and gain headache of managing instances again. Am I ok to sign up for that again? Can I trust myself with it? May be I need to. Let's give it a go.
Markdown is good but not always. Sometimes it is easier to work with WYSIWYG editors. Just write and forget. Sure markdown is more supported. It is again good when working in files. Not otherwise. Did I say am tired of files?
